


Miscellaneous Discworld Shorts (Pt. 1)

by high_spring_tide



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Ankh-Morpork, Ankh-Morpork Post Office, Ankh-Morpork Times, Book: Going Postal, Book: Men At Arms, Book: The Truth, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Inadvisable experimentation with dark light--don't try this at home, Lady Sybil Ramkin and Captain Samuel Vimes's Wedding, The Committee to Unelect the Patrician, The Order of the Post, Unseen University, actually nothing particularly violent happens in the stories per se, and also to one of the times civic leaders tried to kill Vetinari, but there are references to unfortunate things happening to those who cross the Patricians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-13
Updated: 2016-07-13
Packaged: 2018-07-23 19:59:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7477911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/high_spring_tide/pseuds/high_spring_tide
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of unrelated Discworld ficlets, falling somewhere between head canons and extremely short stories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Miscellaneous Discworld Shorts (Pt. 1)

1\. After the events of The Truth, Otto found some wizards who were equally fascinated with dark light, and now experiments with them on his day off. They’re undergraduate students at Unseen University, and they’re the sort that sit in the back row during lectures playing cards until the professor starts to talk about something interesting, like explosions. And then they ask the professor things like, “hypothetically, if one were to amplify the effects of dark light by means of, say, a longer exposure time, what might the results be? Oh, fascinating, and what type of solvent would you need to do that?” 

And the professor, flattered and surprised to see students taking such an interest in his course, is halfway through a long, complicated explanation, with the students in the back row hastily scribbling down notes, when he becomes momentarily suspicious. “You boys aren’t planning on trying this, of course? You do realize it could cause terrible burns and possibly invert the subfractal space-time continuum.” 

“Oh, no, Professor Tarrow-Blossom, we would never do that! Why, that would be reckless!” 

“Foolish!” 

“Our mothers would be so disappointed!” 

“Well, all right, if you’re just interested in the theory, you would need to use at least 30 M perchloric acid. . . “ He’s not the brightest professor on campus, and the students find that they can generally even get away with asking where, hypothetically, they should buy the necessary reagents. 

They like Otto, because he’s as enthusiastic and reckless as they are, and because he’s a proper adult and thus can get out into the city and buy things from suppliers they don’t have access to,* and because they’ve seen how he keeps going with iconography even though it causes him great pain and they think that’s really metal. 

 

2\. At the end of The Truth, the newly-elected Lord Scrope steps down as Patrician with very little fuss. In fact, Scrope’s decision to claim illness, rather than attempt to continue his term as Patrician, was not just based on his general knowledge of Vetinari or on the sudden outpouring of evidence suggesting Vetinari’s innocence. It was based, rather, on the hours he spent in the Palace, looking, optimistically at first, for something resembling extravagant and luxury. (The palace staff and small army of clerks don’t really know what to do or what is expected of them, so they more or less let the new Patrician wander about at random.) Scrope discovers that while Vetinari does have a lot of old books, it seems he isn’t extravagant enough even to heat his office properly. He also discovers, more through chance than skill, a wide variety of incredibly imaginative and merciless traps, and continues to wander in a state of growing terror. He’s walking in circles** around one set of hallways muttering to himself, convinced that stepping on any wrong tile will lead to imminent and horrifying death, when one of the clerks finds him and leads him back to his new office. After that, defying Vetinari and standing up for Traditional Values no longer seems like a very good idea at all.

3\. It was really a shame, Lady Sybil’s butler Willikins thinks, that Lady Sybil’s wedding had gotten messed up so badly. He had known full well that her relatives had all been saying things to the effect of, “You’re marrying who? A captain of the guards? Upon my stars, that’s going to be a total disaster from beginning to end.” And then the wedding day was approaching, and Lady Sybil had done a masterful job of arranging the wedding in accordance with family politics and had managed to mostly avoid conflicts. But then the actual date rolls around, and Willikins can see that all her family’s fears are being confirmed. First of all, the wedding is being held in the Great Hall at Unseen University, not in the proper church where the Ramkins had been getting married for generations. And as if that weren’t bad enough, the Ramkins note, now there’s an orangutan running around all over the place kissing bridesmaids, there’s been some kind of weird attack out in the square, (“The noise made Cousin Lavinia faint,” a second cousin says, “and now Uncle Humbert is muttering darkly about his time in the regiments, and really, no one wants to hear those stories again,”), traffic is backed up for three streets around the university because half of Ankh-Morpork is standing around in the street wanting to watch whatever it is is going on, the Patrician is quietly bleeding to death in the corner (“Not that anyone especially likes him anyway,” an uncle admits, “but really now, it’s hardly in proper taste for a wedding”), the wizards are eating all the food for the reception before the wedding has even started, there seem to be trolls everywhere for some reason (“And claiming to be in the Watch! As if Captain Vimes’s job hadn’t been embarrassing enough before!” a great aunt notes), there’s no best man to speak of, and the groom’s off mucking through the sewers of Ankh-Morpork. About the only good thing, the Ramkin family decides, is the fact that the organ was designed by Bloody Stupid Johnson. There’s the obvious historic interest, of course, but also although it may sound like an organ grinder being murdered by a constipated elephant in a barnyard, it’s loud enough for Great Aunt Edith to hear. “Poor dear,” a first cousin twice-removed notes, “her hearing’s not what it was, but she does so enjoy weddings.” 

4\. The Post Office has a ridiculous number of awards and honors. They are, as Groat assures Moist, very ancient Post Office traditions, and they all sound rather more like knightly or heraldic titles than your average employee-of-the-month contest. These are honors like “Bearer of the Most Honorable Post Office Bell-whistle” and the “Order of Deliverance, Second-Class,” that are awarded to the Post Office staff by Groat more or less at random, as it seems to Moist. The number of awards seems to be growing with time, and Moist suspects this is because a good portion of the workers become quite dejected if they do not win something every month. (Groat vigorously denies that the number of awards is changing.) 

*After Otto had know the students for about a week, the owners of alchemical shops began to wonder why a vampire was buying so many odd chemicals. After he'd known them for a few weeks more, the brewers began to wonder why a vampire was buying so much beer.  
**Technically in squares.


End file.
